[CQ-Contest] Fw: Just when you think

[Igor Sokolov]

>What I can't understand is why rules in some contests only penalise
the receiver for a badly copied call and not the sender.  It seems
>to me that if an appropriate exchange doesn't take place then
neither should there be a valid qso for either party.  If all
contests >supported a scheme in which both stations had to correctly
log calls and other exchange requirements for either to be awarded
points >the emphasis on ID might be improved. (at least in contests)

>Bob, 5B4AGN, P3F
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This is an interesting subject. What Bob said about penalizing both
sides of QSO does make sense. There are two schools of thoughts. One
is the CQWW and WPX where receiving side takes all the penalties. I
was supporting this approach assuming that nowadays senders (well,
most of them) use computers for perfect sending and therefore all the
mistakes are on the receiving side.
Another school of thought is widely used here in Russia for most of
the contests (Russian DX contest excluded). It states that QSO is a
two way road and if something is wrong in one of the logs, then
correct exchange did not take place and both parties should be
penalized. The latter approach, although it sounds true, does not
take into account the fact that the motivation to be awarded points
for QSO could be different with different parties. If I am just
casual participant I do not care much about points an penalties.
Sometimes these participants do not send in log at all and therefore
all contacts with them should not be counted. Russian DX contest
sponsors tried to partly compensate for that by creating "virtual
logs" for such a participants and analyzing the probability of QSO
using sophisticated algorithm.
Anyway in the light of what Bob said, may be the more strict approach
when both stations are responsible for correct exchange in both logs
does make sense.

73, Igor UA9CDC